The Perfect Metaphor
I recently remembered a story my mom likes to tell from when I was little.
We were with family at a hotel pool, and I was the youngest of the group of cousins there. The others, including my older sister, were big enough and good enough swimmers to go in the deep end, and they spent most of their time there.
I was…an okay swimmer. My parents had insisted I take swim lessons. “Because so much of the earth is covered with water,” I remember my mom explaining, “you don’t want it to be a true emergency for you to just fall in.”
But my desire to play with the big kids perhaps exceeded my swimming abilities, so I began playing a dangerous game with myself.
My mom remembers watching nervously as I took my little orange hippopotamus inner tube and frisbeed it into the deep section. Then I would jump in and try to swim to it. Even that short distance was a challenge, but whenever she asked if I needed help, I would refuse. Sometimes she or one of the others ended up having to fish me out anyway.
But she remembers me laughing even as my head went under a few times.
I realized recently that that’s a good illustration for how I’m living my adult life: I use my resources and am surrounded by my safety net of people, but ultimately I’m at a place of pushing boundaries.
What does this have to do with spooky stuff?
I spent the entire first twenty years of my life being afraid.
Perhaps “afraid” is too easy a way to phrase it, since I started treatment for anxiety in my twenties. But whether for clinical or personal reasons, I spent much of my time afraid.
Of dogs. Of cats. Of any other animal. The wind. The dark. And especially people in costumes. I even hated change in every form. I had a meltdown when my parents had the ugly flooring in the kitchen replaced in my childhood home. Relatives remember that whenever anyone left, I would follow them to the door, crying and carrying my Barbie pillow and some clothes, begging them to take me with them.
As you can imagine, that life is costly. It costs energy, relationships, and opportunities, so many opportunities. I would show up somewhere and be too afraid to interact, even if I knew some people or desperately wanted to join in an activity.
Treatment for anxiety was the start. But only the start.
Stepping Out
I didn’t really rebel much in my teenage years. Sure, I argued with my parents like it was my job and pushed boundaries, but nothing truly rebellious or scary. In some ways, I’m glad. Some of the stuff people try in their teens can cause permanent damage, if not wreck your life completely. But there are places I wish I had been braver.
I wish I would’ve quit band in high school and joined a community band, because sticking with something you love isn’t worth your mental health. I wish I would’ve at least stood up to the director who treated us cruelly and bullied even my mother.
I wish I would’ve talked back to the people who picked on me or my friends.
I wish I would’ve just spoken up when teachers enforced rules that didn’t make any sense instead of bottling it up and complying for the sake of efficiency.
So as an adult, freshly on my own and able to control larger portions of my life, I’ve been pushing boundaries.
It started in college. I went skydiving. I studied in Spain. I tried speech and debate. And while some experiments failed miserably, others were roaring successes, and when I look back, the parts of my life I’m the most proud of are when I stepped out and did something that even I didn’t think I could handle.
Now I’m testing some the limits I used to live by, because I’ve become so sick of living in fear.
I used to fear animals. I’m now the happy mama of two cats.
I used to think the music they played in Hot Topic was scary. Now I listen to heavy metal and can rarely resist popping in to see the latest merch.
I used to have trouble sleeping if I heard a ghost story, but I find them fascinating, so I listen.
Plenty of psychological disorders are frightening, but I’ve found that the more I learn about them, the less I fear and the more I pity the victim. It’s also marvelous that some of the things we fear the most are being studied and can sometimes be helped.
Don’t get me wrong; I still have to set boundaries. Some things are just too dark for me (The Witcher, Game of Thrones, horror movies) or upset as much as entertain me (medical dramas) to the point that I’ve made the decision to live without them. I also try to follow biblical boundaries.
But I sure am tired of living in fear. And that, too, is biblical.
My Old Companion
In recent years, I’ve branched into a lot of dark or seemingly macabre interests.
The YouTube channel Ask a Mortician has immersed me in the world of how humans have cared for their dead across the world and across time. What I like about it is that it yanks the frightening veil off of facing death and makes it a practical matter. This, coupled with knowing Christ has already conquered death, allows me to work through the complicated emotions and make choices for loved ones that are respectful and personal. No matter how safe or isolated you are, death will come knocking, so it’s best to learn about and face it with courage. It doesn’t have to be scarier than it is.
I’ve also begun listening to true crime, believe it or not, along with spooky stories that can’t be explained. I’ve always loved fascinating stories, but sometimes they were too scary for me. But I’ve found that when such stories are shared in an empathetic, matter-of-fact manner without adding to the drama with, say, reenactments or scary music, it’s much more respectful and easier to bear. Better yet, we can unpack the crime that was committed and what it means for us as a human race and as a society.
Just like the study of psychology, I love anything that chooses to look fear in the face and get the facts. It’s like turning on the lights and making a thorough search of the room instead of hiding under the covers when you hear a noise. It’s intimidating at first, but it’s only there that you’ll find your answers, and any monsters you do find are often smaller or less powerful than they seemed. It’s certainly better than waiting for them to come get you.
This also applies in my faith. While plenty of biblical questions still leave me shaking in my boots, my favorite people are the ones who aren’t afraid to ask the hard questions. Anyone who was raised in a faith community has probably had the experience of their questions receiving short shrift for the sake of time, or even being outright discouraged for fear of what the asker may conclude.
The truth is, we’re surrounded by hard questions, tragic events, and outright evil. Pretending it isn’t there won’t make it go away; it’ll only make you limit yourself so you don’t have to look at it. But it’s still there, and the more you shut yourself off to it, the more vulnerable you become to the very questions you seek to avoid. It may also stunt your ability to help others, leaving you afraid to respond with compassion and likely to answer their pain and grief with pat answers that can take a lifetime to recover from.
Fear is an old companion of mine, one I know well. But that only motivates me to fight harder against him whenever I recognize his paralyzing influence. Defying him brings me joy and teaches me to love myself, so while I can’t make him leave me alone completely, I can drag him along on adventures that show me who I am and what I’m capable of. It allows me to explore the questions that haunt me and plenty of other people, and sometimes come to peace with things that used to leave me completely immobilized.
If you want to know, ask.
If you want to see, look.
Some boundaries are in place for our good.
But the ones that aren’t – that is, the ones that stem not from wisdom but from fear – I’ve started poking with a stick.
